Betekenisinhoud

Betekenisinhoud is a Dutch term used in linguistics and philosophy of language to denote the semantic content of a linguistic expression—the propositional content or sense that a statement expresses, independent of how it is used in a particular situation. The word combines betekenis (meaning) with inhoud (content). In many theories, betekenisinhoud is closely related to notions such as sense or intension and is distinguished from pragmatic effects that depend on context and use.

The betekenisinhoud of a sentence is often linked to its truth-conditions: the conditions under which the sentence would be true or false. For example, the sentence “De zon schijnt” has the content that the sun is shining; its truth value depends on the actual state of the world, not on who says it or for what purpose. Contextual factors, such as speaker intention or conversational implicatures, may influence the interpretation of a sentence, but they do not change its basic betekenisinhoud.

In linguistic analysis, betekenisinhoud is used to discuss how words and sentences convey meaning beyond immediate usage. Polysemy and ambiguity illustrate how a single expression can have different betekenisinhouds depending on sense, while context helps determine which sense is intended. In applied settings, such as natural language processing and translation, modeling betekenisinhoud aids in extracting stable semantic content for reasoning and cross-linguistic mapping.

Overall, betekenisinhoud serves as a foundational concept for understanding how language encodes meaning at the level of content, separate from the interactive effects of discourse and situational context.